Classical Music This Week: Levine Cancels and a Birthday Triptych

Good morning, classical music lovers! Will you be at the opening night of the season at the besieged Carnegie Hall tonight? Or at the start of a series of concerts at the Miller Theater celebrating the composer John Luther Adams?

It had seemed like James Levine, the Met’s longtime music director, was done with his long period of illness-related cancellations. After all, since returning to the Met in 2013 after a two-year hiatus, he’s only canceled a single performance, out of dozens.

Until now, that is: The Met announced late Friday afternoon that Mr. Levine, 72, is dropping out of a much-anticipated new production of one of his favorite operas, Berg’s “Lulu,” directed by the visual-arts star William Kentridge. It must have lately become clear to him — as it’s been clear to most of the opera world for months — that rehearsing the very long, difficult “Lulu” while conducting a run of Wagner’s very long, difficult “Tannhäuser” was simply too much for him; he’ll stick solely with “Tannhäuser.”

It’s not an overstatement to say that “Lulu” exists at the Met because of Mr. Levine: He conducted not just the work’s Met premiere (in two acts) in 1977, but also the company premiere of the opera’s three-act version in 1980 and almost all of the performances since. (In 2010, suffering, yes, from injuries, he ceded a short run to Fabio Luisi.) The extravagant new Kentridge production would have probably never been planned without his advocacy and involvement.

Surely this is yet another clarion call that it’s time — long past time — for Mr. Levine to make a transition to an emeritus role. Maybe then, with a fresh perspective to set alongside that of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, the company can reverse the “artistic retrenchment” that Alex Ross rightly observes this season.

Happy Birthdays!

What a week. Thursday is the 145th birthday of Louis Vierne, the organ virtuoso and composer whose Fourth Symphony (of six solo ones for his instrument) was played a few weeks ago in Brooklyn by the young Viernian Christopher Houlihan. Here’s Mr. Houlihan playing that work’s finale, in a video from 2009.

Then there’s Saint-Saëns, born on Oct. 9, 1835. While we’re on the subject of organ symphonies, here’s that composer’s grand Symphony No. 3, “avec orgue,” in a thrilling performance conducted by Paavo Jarvi.

And on Saturday, we can be thankful (as we are every day, let’s be honest) for the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, 202 years young. There is, for me, no footage that gets to the heart of his genius — the intersection of the personal and political, the combination of lyricism and declamation, the focusing of intense emotion through the rigors of musical form — like this video of Maria Callas, in concert, singing Elisabetta’s climactic aria from “Don Carlo.”

Any other favorites by Vierne, Saint-Saëns or Verdi? Let me know in the comments, email zach.woolfe@nytimes.com or tweet @zwoolfe. Happy listening!

Correction:Oct. 8, 2015

An earlier version of this article misidentified the conductor of the performance of Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 shown in the accompanying video. He is Paavo Jarvi, not Neeme Jarvi (Paavo Jarvi’s father).